Mulch

[Arzosah]

I had a look through to see if anyone was writing about mulch, and couldn't see anything, so I thought I'd start a thread.

To me, mulch is really important in planning for my garden and healthy crops. Its one of the basics of an organic approach, I suppose - feed the soil and not the plant, though not all mulches are meant to rot into the soil, of course. It also cuts down on the need for watering, of course, and stops so many weeds growing up - there are still some, of course, because there always are, but also because you can't put mulch right up to a plant, not often anyway, that will often cause the stem/stalk to rot. Which would be a bad thing!

The first mulch in my garden was exactly that - not meant to rot. Slate chips, beautiful blue slate from North Wales, with a few little green stones every now and again. I have a trench between the paving of my patio and the house - when I got here, there were weeds and lots of horrible hidey holes for massive great spiders that regularly came into the house Jump to a year later, and the trench has been weeded, excavated to the depth of two bricks. Then I put a permeable membrane down, to stop the roots of anything that *did* manage to take root, and washed the slate chips clear of mud before laying them down (they were recycled from my sister's garden). They look lovely now!

The second form of mulch, is leaves. Last autumn (fall in North America) I collected a total of 25 bin bags full of leaves, and left them to rot outside in the garden. They have to be wet when you put them in the bag, and you have to pierce holes in the bag to let little worms and whatnot in to do their work on the leaves. I've already used some, but they haven't yet decomposed fully, its true. That might be because nearly all of them are oak leaves - oaks are the single most common tree in my town, I only have one bag that isn't full of oak leaves. They'll add body to the soil, when I do put them on, and they'll help with water retentiveness and structure.

The third form is egg shells! I never throw an egg shell away - they go back into the box to start drying out, and when I've used all the eggs in that particular box, the shells get put into the oven while I'm warming it up for some cooking, and the eggbox goes into the recycling bin that my local town council collects.

I do have some more of that permeable membrane, which could be used as a mulch over soil in its own right, but I don't want to - I'm still not sure where all the bulbs are in this garden, and this locality as a whole is full of ground dwelling bees - I took a little video with my compact camera last summer, It just means I really don't fancy such a blanket mulch - I'd rather have a natural material.

Which brings me to the stuff sitting in bags on the patio! Bark mulch - lovely big chunks of the stuff. Not so lovely if you're thinking about it degrading into the soil, but it looks beautiful.

Anyway, thats what I'm doing.

What are other people using?

 

[DrCase]

I have been adding hard wood and cypress mulch from are local saw mill to my beds for ever.
Some of my older beds have come up a foot and a half from it very fertile ground
I get it by the trailer load it saves a lot of money

I do use river rock in a few beds in my front yard

 

[Tmann]

I used shredded hardwood in the past but didn't like how it faded. Then I used another mulch that was black but like the hardwood it too faded, and was too fine. So this last year I put down pine straw and I have to say that this is my favorite so far. i like the look and it stays in place, does not blow or wash away. I will be going with pine straw again.

 

[Arzosah]

Hi folks!

Sawdust! I did have a single bag of sawdust, actually - there's a tiny little nature reserve near me, and the local community college trainees cut down a few trees that were dying, and left heaps and heaps of sawdust around. I filled up a bag, and scattered it on my little flower border at the front - it was only the one bag, since it was from such a one-off source, and all trace of it has disappeared now. Mind you, just by our railway station, there's a builder's merchants that specialises in wood, and I'm sure they mill stuff there, and create sawdust. Might be worth looking to see if I can get some! In my experience, if people have to pay to dispose of commercial waste, they're very happy for local people to take what they want to recycle.

Pine straw sounds interesting, Tmann - I've just googled to find the phrase, we don't use it in the UK. But thats great! Pine needles that have fallen from the tree, yes? Interesting that it doesn't blow away - and a great resource for plants like blueberries, which like that level of acidity. There are a few big pine trees in my local park that shed their needles, I think I'll be out there in future. Thanks.

The other thing I use, as an initial mulch to clear the ground, is cardboard, which is whats in my avatar picture at the moment - I'm extending my borders inwards, so I chopped the grass as short as I could, raked it to get rid of as much as possible, and then laid down some thick cardboard. I weighted it after that. Its been down since last summer, and I'm really looking forward to pulling it up and starting to get to grips with planting the area now!

 

[iagirl]

I use the chicken bedding when I clean out the house. Wood shavings is what it is with some fertilizer. Everyone says that it's too much having chicken manure in it but I've never had a problem, the plants love it. They don't understand it's not all fresh manure. It helps keep the weeds down, the soil moist and the plants happy. The chickens go in and mix it up a bit daily and eat the bugs. Makes for a nicer garden with less work.

 

[Jed]

I use straw. Mostly barley straw as it's grown a lot down here. I buy it by the bale at about $13 Aus. Perhaps 12 bales a year are used thickly to suppress the weeds in the vegetable gardens. We also have access to mushroom compost with the added benefits of mushroom growing in our gardens.

 

[lovinglife]

I use lawn clippings, we don't put chemicals on the grass so we mulch our vegetable plants with it, helps with the soil too, of course we always have plenty of bunny poo to spread around and work into the soil. Wish I could get some of the mushroom compost, that would be awesome!

 

[Kyla]

Here in the Pacific Northwest, mulch is a little controversial, if you can believe it! I have always loved to use mulch and was introduced to the concept by reading Ruth Stout's classic How To Have A Green Thumb Without An Aching Back. She describes how she mulched with up to (and more than) 6 inches of spoiled hay and how effective that was for keeping down weeds and for making the garden soil rich and productive.

Here, however, it a really wet climate, slugs are a major garden pest and I have discovered to my dismay that they just LOVE mulch. So now I mulch more carefully and not around everything but only in areas where slug damage is not that problematic. Since there is not the problem here of keeping moisture in the soil for most of the year, mulch is not as necessary as it is in some other places.

 

[Tmann]

You could always use cedar mulch as I believe it helps with slugs

 

[Arzosah]

Oh my word! Slugs and mulch ... I could imagine that if you had a bark mulch, and the pieces were quite big, or even the cardboard mulch that I have, as its disintegrating, it might well encourage slugs But I suspect that smaller pieces, or a stone mulch, wouldn't do the same thing.

We had a wet year last year, and *everyone* had loads and loads of slug damage - but we also use mulch to keep weeds down, as well as moisture in. I appreciate that the Pacific North West doesn't have a major lack of water! You're famous for it, actually!

 

[Kyla]

LOL! Yes and it is pouring down right now.

Interesting about cedar mulch, Tmann, I wonder if that would work. These slugs here are voracious and they are just hard to deal with when they have any moist places to hide. Personally I don't like to use a mulch that won't break down - using stones or even bark, I find, makes the soil so hard to work it isn't worth it. (Though I know a lot of people do use and like those for mulch.)

The mulch I liked the best actually was a composted rabbit manure that still had lots of the wood shavings (white pine) from their cages. Although it definitely did not deter slugs, it also did not provide them any unusually appealing places to hide, and it worked beautifully to keep the weeds down as well as enrich the soil.

 

[dim]

the problem with using bark / wood as a mulch, is that sometimes it leaches the nitrogen from the soil, especially if t's still a bit wet

so, the solution is that before you mulch for the 1st time, add an inch or two of compost to the soil them mulch with the wood/bark ontop of that

the wood/bark will eventually decompose and turn to compost, then just add another layer of wood/bark mulch ontop of that

so, you only need to add a layer of compost the 1st time before mulching with wood/bark

 

[LouisFerdinand]

The best and worst mulch for the garden